Preserving Spokane’s Black History
Spokane Public Library
Innovation Synopsis
The Spokane Public Library partnered with the Carl Maxey Center, a Black-led and Black-centered community center in the heart of Spokane’s historic East Central neighborhood to host a community scanning day. Collaborating with archivists and historians from Eastern Washington University, the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, and the Spokane Historic Preservation Office, this event was centered on founding a Digital Archive dedicated to preserving Spokane’s Black history, by inviting members of the community to bring in items to be digitized and added to a public digital archive.
Challenge/Opportunity
Archival collections tend to reflect communities and individuals who hold positions of power. While the Black community in Spokane has been here for over 140 years and has made rich and meaningful contributions to the region, it can be challenging to find those stories within the local archives and museums. Having representation in archives is one way to help honor and understand the past, and to have your community be visible, represented, known, and celebrated. During this event, we emphasized to participants that history is made up of everyday stories and that we wanted to celebrate every story.
Key Elements of Innovation
The Spokane Public Library, the Carl Maxey Center, and our community partners collaborated to create a democratized collection-building practice. By leveraging the strengths of five institutions, we were able to host the event and create a Digital Archive that we will be able to sustainably maintain and grow in the future. By using Creative Commons licenses and encouraging participants to create their own metadata, we empowered participants to maintain copyright and descriptive control over their items.
Achieved Outcomes
The Digital Archive that the Spokane Public Library is hosting for the Carl Maxey Center is a place of community connection to help showcase the rich stories of Black Spokane. During the event, we digitized close to 600 items, including family photographs, the charter for the Spokane chapter of the NAACP, a scrapbook from a historically Black church, business cards, and the entire run of the local African-American Voice newspaper. This project has become a model for how to create and sustain a community-driven archive to help highlight underrepresented voices in your community.
